Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a dynamic facility management system. More specifically, the present invention relates to a technique that is suitably applied to a system that recognizes a state to monitor, secure, and maintain a target facility and collects and uses information used for facility management.
Description of Related Art
Regarding electric power distribution facilities such as transformers and switches, a ratio of highly aged facilities that have been used more than 30 years since the start of operation increases. Further, there is a limitation of the number of maintenance works that can be performed in one year, so that it is impossible to collectively update a large number of facilities around the same time. Therefore, it is becoming a challenge to stably maintain a highly aged facility and efficiently operate the highly aged facility from a viewpoint of economy. To overcome such a challenge, the introduction of methods such as condition based maintenance (CBM: abbreviation of Condition Based Maintenance) and reliability centered maintenance (RCM: abbreviation of Reliability Centered Maintenance) is advanced. To implement these methods, it is necessary to recognize a state of an operating electric power distribution facility. Therefore, a system that collects and uses various information used for facility maintenance plays an important role. In the present invention, such a system is referred to as a facility maintenance system. The various information used for facility maintenance is referred to as maintenance information or facility maintenance data.
In the facility maintenance system, it is required to be able to quickly and easily construct a mechanism to collect and use information used for facility maintenance when the condition based maintenance or the like is required. This is based on the fact that the lives of sensors and information communication devices included in the facility maintenance system are as short as about 10 years or less and the cost does not pay off if the sensors and the information communication devices are permanently installed in a period of time in which failure hardly occurs in the facility to be monitored and maintained, so that it is expected to increase the cost-effectiveness if states are collected by a minimum number of sensors during normal time and sensors are added in a stage in which a failure sign is detected or in a stage changing from a random failure stage to a degradation failure stage in a bathtub curve.
Therefore, it is desirable that software that collects, manages, and processes the facility maintenance data is automatically set in the facility maintenance system and the state monitoring can be quickly and easily started when sensors are attached to or removed from the facility to be monitored and maintained. Such an automatic setting function is referred to as plug-and-play and is also written as PnP in the present invention. The inventors have studied a facility maintenance system based on an information model to realize such PnP. The information model is to process and exchange maintenance information and corresponds to a blueprint of an object which is a type of a software module. A module called an object can be used, so that it is possible to clarify units of combination in the PnP.
In a facility management system including the aforementioned facility maintenance system which monitors, secures, and maintains a target facility, it is necessary to associate a plurality of objects with each other and further it is necessary for the objects associated with each other to collect, manage, and process various information used for facility management, such as maintenance information and facility maintenance data through a communication network. In the present invention, such a system in which a plurality of objects are associated with each other and the objects associated with each other collect, manage, and process data and the like while autonomously coping with a situation is referred to as a dynamic facility management system. The various information used for facility management is referred to as facility management data.
As a conventional technique related to connecting to a communication network, there is Universal Plug and Play (Patent Literature 1). The Universal Plug and Play is written as UPnP.